San Diego case plays into Scout 'perversion files'

An array of local authorities — police chiefs, prosecutors, pastors and Boy Scout leaders among them — quietly shielded scoutmasters and others who allegedly molested children, according to a newly opened trove of confidential files compiled from 1959 to1985.

At the time, those authorities justified their actions as necessary to protect the good name and good works of Scouting. But as detailed in 14,500 pages of secret “perversion files” released Thursday by order of the Oregon Supreme Court, their maneuvers protected suspected sexual predators while victims suffered in silence.

The files document sex abuse allegations across the country, from a small town in the Adirondacks to downtown Los Angeles.

One case showing an organization slow to act came in 1983, when scouting officials in Virginia attempted to confirm reports that volunteer Max C.W. Kelly had been convicted of child molestation while volunteering with the scouts in San Diego County in 1976.

The Virginia scouting officials wrote to San Diego executives in September 1983, but no reply is contained in the case file. They eventually expelled Kelly from the organization in August 1984.

“I regret that it has taken our council so long to act on this matter, but our Scouters wanted to be very careful and be certain that we had properly identified Mr. Kelly and that his behavior justified our investigation,” Randall E. Beaver, a Scout executive in Virginia, wrote to a national scouting official at one point during months of bureaucratic delays.

At a news conference Thursday, Portland attorney Kelly Clark blasted the Boy Scouts for their continuing legal battles to try to keep the files secret.

“You do not keep secrets hidden about dangers to children,” said Clark, who in 2010 won a landmark lawsuit against the Boy Scouts on behalf of a plaintiff who was molested by an assistant scoutmaster in the 1980s.

The new files are an incomplete window on documents the Boy Scouts of America began collecting soon after their founding in 1910. The files, kept at Boy Scout headquarters in Texas, consist of memos from local and national Scout executives, handwritten letters from victims and their parents and newspaper clippings about legal cases. The files contain details about proven molesters, but also unsubstantiated allegations.

The 1959-85 files show that on many occasions the files succeeded in keeping pedophiles out of Scouting leadership positions — the reason they were collected in the first place. But they document some troubling patterns.

In many instances — more than a third, according to the Scouts’ own count — police weren’t told about the alleged abuse.

And there is little mention in the files of concern for the welfare of Scouts who were allegedly abused by their leaders. There are numerous documents showing compassion for suspected abusers, who were often times sent to psychiatrists or pastors to get help.

In 1972, a Pennsylvania Scouting executive wrote a memo recommending a case against a suspected abuser be dropped with the words: “If it don’t stink, don’t stir it.”

One of the most startling revelations to come from the files is the frequency with which attempts to protect Scouts from alleged molesters collapsed at the local level, at times in collusion with community leaders.

On the afternoon of Aug. 10, 1965, a distraught Louisiana mother walked into the Ouachita Parish Sheriff’s Office. A 31-year-old scoutmaster, she told the chief criminal deputy, had raped one of her sons and molested two others.

Six days later, the scoutmaster sat down in the same station and confessed.

“I don’t know an explanation, why we done it or I done it or wanted to do it or anything else it just — an impulse I guess or something,” the man told a sheriff’s deputy.

The decision was made not to pursue charges. “This subject and Scouts were not prosecuted,” a Louisiana Scouts executive wrote to national headquarters, “to save the name of Scouting.”

In a statement on Thursday, Scouts spokesman Deron Smith said there have been times when Scouts’ responses to sex abuse allegations were “plainly insufficient, inappropriate, or wrong” and the organization extends its “deepest and sincere apologies to victims and their families.”

The Scouts in late September made public an internal review of the files and said they would look into past cases to see whether there were times when abusers should have been reported to police.

In the case of the Rocky Mount, Va., volunteer with a 1976 conviction in San Diego, it’s not clear why he was not added to the Boy Scouts ineligible volunteer roster, known as the perversion files.

Beaver, the Scout executive in Virginia, wrote a letter to Ronald K. Brundage, a Scout executive in San Diego in September, 1983, about “a rather delicate matter” involving Kelly, who had recently signed on. Copied on the letter was Paul I. Ernst, a Scout executive in charge of registration at the Boy Scouts of America headquarters in Irving, Texas.

The “rather delicate matter” involved Kelly’s child molestation conviction in San Diego County, according to the letter. Apparently, Kelly had been placed on probation following the conviction and then gone to Rocky Mount, where he enlisted with the scouts as a volunteer.

Scout officials in Virginia didn’t know about Kelly’s criminal past, so they allowed him to volunteer, the letter said. Beaver asked Brundage to send documentation of the conviction so officials in Virginia could “determine if it would be advisable for us to exclude Mr. Kelly from Scouting activities.”

No response from Brundage is contained in the scout file, but the matter caught Ernst’s attention.

In October, 1983, Ernst wrote a letter to Beaver asking for additional documentation of the conviction that “would enable us to place Mr. Kelly on the file and refuse registration.”

Met with silence, he repeated his request to Beaver in letters dated in January, April, and June of 1984. In July of the same year, Ernst wrote again.

“The information which you originally gave us sounds serious enough that registration should be refused,” Ernst wrote in the July letter. “Without more information, however, we just cannot refuse the registration.”

Beaver eventually obtained documentation and wrote to Ernst that it was “absolutely unforgivable” if Kelly had been registered as a volunteer in San Diego and officials here had not reported the conviction when it happened in 1976.

“How will we ever know that other children were not victimized because of their negligence?” Beaver wrote.

On Aug. 28, 1984, Scouting officials in Rocky Mount confronted Kelly about his criminal history and expelled him from the Boy Scouts of America, the case file shows.